“This year, for the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-olds lost ground in math, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years.” The New York Times
For years, I’ve been advising parents to encourage their children to read fairy tales and fantasy stories because of a quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” My own children developed rich imaginations and large vocabularies from such a reading diet; reading comprehension scores were never an issue while they were growing up. However, I no longer think that’s enough. Today, I’d add non-fiction in the form of biographies, children’s encyclopedias, and books about history and science because such topics make up over half of what students read on reading comprehension tests. Basic background knowledge about wars, inventions, and controversies of the past (think American slavery here) helps children understand how the world they live in came to be.
However, as things stand now, we have a lot of work to do. Last week, I planned a lesson for fifth graders on “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that I tried to memorize when I was about ten years old. (I got to the third verse.)
Now, these particular students read below grade level, so I was unsurprised when I had to explain that “the eighteenth of April in ‘75” meant April 18, 1775, but was gob-smacked when we bogged down on the second verse:
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light, —
One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”
My students did not know why the British were marching. In fact, they said they had not heard of the American Revolutionary War, let alone Paul Revere or the thirteen colonies. Then, it came out that they were unsure how many states there are in the United States. One boy thought there were forty-four, and another actually argued when I said there were fifty.
We looked at a map of the thirteen colonies, and I tried to summarize the war in a few sentences. Then, we looked at pictures of belfry arches on churches and I reminded them that in a time without electricity or telephones, a light on a dark night was one of the few ways to communicate with someone at a distance.
This week, we’re going to pick up the poem again. I’m not sure whether they will be able to write their own narrative poems, even really short ones, but at least they will have read an iconic piece of American literature and seen how it commemorates an important moment in American history. There’s value in that as well.
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